Creative culture is on the rise, thanks largely to recent technology. Anybody can shoot a video or record a song and upload it to YouTube and millions of people might see it. Digital technology has put the arts back into the hands of the people.

Copyright lawyer and chairman of Creative Commons Larry Lessig gave a presentation about a year and a half ago in which he talks about the way that the younger generation’s perception of creativity and copyright has changed since their parents’. This generation has the tools and the desire to remix, mash-up and recreate the music they hear and the videos they watch and turn them into something new. The way they appreciate art is by engaging with it and making it their own.

Lessig suggests that the law has not greeted “this new use of culture using digital technologies” with much common sense. Common sense would have been to realize that times have changed, that digital technology has fundamentally altered the way that consumers and creators alike are able to produce, enjoy and interact with art. Common sense would have been for entities like the RIAA to acknowledge that fact and adapt business practices to be remain competitive in the emerging market.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, “the architecture of copyright law and the architecture digital technologies as they interact have produced the presumptionthat these activities are illegal.” Lessig continues, “because if copyright law at it’s core regulates something called ‘copies’ than in the digital world the one fact we can’t escape is that every single use of digital technology produces a copy. Every single use therefore requires permission. Without permission you are a trespasser.”

So this presumption that remixes, mash-ups, videos or any other fan created content that uses copyrighted material are illegal has made nearly an entire generation guilty of breaking the law. I love it that he uses the word presumption – this is one of the foremost lawyers on copyright saying that what the RIAA believes about copyright law is not correct.

The RIAA has seen the internet and digital technology as a threat to their business, and responded by taking an extreme position regarding copyright law. This exaggerated version of copyright all but ignores the concept of fair-use and considers – wrongly – that every use of copyrighted material is illegal.

So they crack down, launching a huge legal offensive against just about everybody, including individual consumers suspected of violating their interpretation of copyright law. This in turn creates a growing backlash – both among those whose genuinely illegal activities were thwarted, and those whose legitimate fair-use was wrongly lumped together with piracy. Now the world is experiencing a “growing copyright abolitionism” says Lessig, “a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do … and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other – a fact we should have learned many, many times over.”

You and I can’t control the RIAA. They have proven that they are out of touch with today’s digital culture and determined to snuff out any innovation that smells like it might disrupt the traditional models. We can influence the other side of the table, though.

Artists don’t have to get in bed with the RIAA. The new independent, DIY approach to a career in music is not just a pipe dream anymore – there are plenty of success stories to look to now. In this new marketplace the artists who recognize the value of openness will be the ones who succeed. The ones who see the benefit of allowing their fans to remix their tracks, or to produce amateur videos for their songs and spread them across the Internet.

Regardless of what we have been taught to believe recently, there is such a thing as fair use, and it’s in the artist’s best interests to allow it. [emphasis newsgrist's] Release your music under a more open license such as Creative Commons and see what happens. Let your fans do the promoting – if you give them a quality product and the freedom to use it the way they want use it they’ll do a surprisingly good job. Better than you could ever do, maybe even with a big-label marketing budget that only the top acts see anyway.

As is well-known, the artist Richard Prince has lost his copyright infringement suit to the photographer Patrick Cariou [see Artnet News, March 21, 2011]. The decision is now pending an appeal. The news has prompted heated commentary by almost everyone, including copyright maximalists, photographers, collage artists, painters who use appropriated imagery, New York dealers and “open source” mavens. IP lawyers have written boilerplate statements, typically devoid of any nuance or even the most basic understanding of the visual arts. Artists and photographers who either bear Prince a personal grudge, or else find his and others’ methods of appropriation suspect, have trotted out the usual platitudes: "lazy" "thief" "millionaire." In fact, one would think from reading the comments sections of art blogs that Prince’s great crime was in being successful, and that copyright is a convenient tool for redistributing some of his wealth.

But copyright law is not about generating or artificially leveraging artists’ income. It is certainly not about redistributing deserved or undeserved wealth. Copyright is about regulating mass production. Its roots are in late 17th- and early 18th-century publishing and the globalization of the printing press (cf: Statute of Anne, ca. 1709). Long before digital technologies changed the game plan, copyright became a way to deal with the new global mass culture.

Later, photography, because it too relied on mass production and distribution, became reliant on copyright. Among other things, copyright could be wielded as a deterrent for those who might reproduce and profit from works without the permission of their authors. The problem lay in the fact that, with mass-produced works of literature, music or visual art, there is no inherent or tangible difference between an original and a copy. Obviously, this is not so for paintings, sculpture, etc. -- one-of-a-kind art objects. And authors of one-of-a-kind works have not conventionally relied on copyright to collect licensing fees or royalties, since there are no mass-produced copies that can be sold -- only originals. Hence, painters and sculptors have used different earning models, such as the gallery system, for selling their work.

Patrick Cariou comes out of photography culture, which is part of mass culture. Photography culture lives and breathes by licensing agreements and royalties, and through copyright. Richard Prince, comes out of a moment when artists were using “appropriation” as a tool to comment on and criticize mass production. His work has always referenced his source material, and hence mass culture itself. Part of the value of his work today, around which much of the case revolves, is based on his reputation as a critic of and commentator on mass culture.

For the disputed “Canal Zone” series, Prince took copies of photographs from Yes Rasta, Cariou’s book on Rastafarian culture (PowerHouse Books, 2000, $60). In other words, Prince re-used photographs that had been mass-produced in the form of a book, in order to make his collage-like paintings. To say that Cariou’s work was used as “raw material” is not to demean the work; it is simply a factual description of how the photographs were used. The “Canal Zone” series also incorporates works by other photographers, including some by the underground filmmaker Richard Kern. Prince took more than 40 of Cariou’s images, scanned them, blew them up, affixed them to enormous canvases, collaged and squeegeed them together with other elements, oil stick and paint, producing one-of-a-kind objects. These large-scale collaged paintings reference their sources by re-instituting them as singular objects. On that basis alone, Prince’s work is transformative -- a determining factor that U.S. District Court Judge Deborah A. Batts unfortunately chose to ignore.

What leaves me breathless is one particular irony, among the many that surround this case, regarding Judge Batts’ decision in the awarding of damages, which include, potentially, the destruction of the offending works. The very existence of Prince’s “Canal Zone” series is apparently now in peril, in part because no one seems to be able to tell the difference between a painting, which is a one-of-a-kind object, and a photograph, which is by definition mass-producible.

Hence the irony. Some things cannot be easily destroyed, and whatever Prince may have done with the mass-produced copies of Cariou’s photographs, the photographs themselves remain intact. But one-of-kind art objects, once disposed of, are deleted forever.

March 30, 2011

There was a very big legal ruling last week having to do with copyright in the art world. It involves the artwork of Richard Prince, an appropriation artist, who took some photographs from Patrick Cariou's book Yes, Rasta, of various Rastafarians, and then used them in various paintings. There were a bunch of photographs used -- this is the comparison shot that has been used in a lot of the press coverage:

That's Cariou's photo on the left, and Prince's painting on the right. I'll admit that, personally, I'm not that impressed. But I'm really not sure what my art criticism should have to do with anything. Yet, many others seem to want to jump in and have their own criticisms of the art determine whether or not this sort of thing should be allowed. And that's troubling from the perspective of letting artists create what moves them, rather than setting up laws over what is and is not allowed to be art.

In this case, despite plenty of other lawsuits that found appropriation art to be legal, the judge ruled that this is infringing, leading many to predict a pretty massive shakeup in the modern art world, where this kind of appropriation art has become pretty common. What strikes me as most troubling is that the judge's decision appears to rest mainly on what the artist's stated intent was in creating these paintings, and deciding that since he was neither commenting on the original works nor the subjects of the images, it's no longer a protected fair use. That seems questionable. Why should the intent of the artist matter one way or the other? As law professor Peter Friedman notes in the link above:

One take away from this is that any time an artist is sued, they should just insist that the artwork they created was "commenting" on the original work, even if it wasn't. But why is that the standard? The fair use standard doesn't say anything about intent, and judging the true intent of an artist seems like a really dangerous game. Some, like Charlie Finch, are pointing out how this is a dangerous slippery slope under which judges are determining the value of artwork:

Judge Batts implied a kind of slippery slope by observing that Prince had not cut up or sectioned Cariou's pictures sufficiently, making an observer wonder whether a Mimmo Rotella standard of radical pictorial transformation would be the minimum standard for fair use.

Either way, having a judge as an interpreter of the meaning of art remains Kafkaesque: we can trot out the entire oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and a thousand other artists as violators of Judge Batts' standard.

The reality is that the judge here seems to have gone beyond what fair use has said in the past, in creating this new standard. As Greg Allen warns this is a massive limiting of fair use:

If it stands, it would have major, sweeping, and stifling effects.

Not only would the current operating assumptions of fair use and transformative use be ratcheted way back, but the contemporary art world would be turned upside down. It would restrict both how artists appropriate, or even refer to, copyrighted work. And it would turn galleries into copyright police, with an affirmative responsibility to clear images, sources, and references for the work they show and sell.

That last point is also notable. It wasn't just Prince who was sued, but also the art gallery that displayed his works, which was found guilty of direct infringement for displaying and selling the works, and then also found guilty of vicarious and contributory infringement because it "had the right and ability (and perhaps even responsibility) to ensure that Prince obtained licenses." That seems like a pretty big stretch as well.

In the end, I'm sure people will stick up for this ruling because they don't think what Richard Prince did was very good or particularly artistic. Yet, clearly, many in the art world disagree with you, as his paintings sell for extraordinarily high prices. And, in the end, shouldn't that be the determining factor? If people are willing to consider this artwork and pay for it as artwork, then what's the problem? On top of that, it seems like Cariou should have been able to capitalize on this attention himself, increasing the value of his own work.

And... speaking of Cariou's work... one question I have in all of this is how much is Cariou paying the Rastafarians that he photographed? After all, isn't he making use of their works as well? Either way, Prince has made it clear that he's appealing and has hired some powerhouse lawyers to help him out. Of course, he had to appeal quickly, because under the original ruling, all of his paintings at issue in this lawsuit were to be destroyed.

Others are delighted at Prince's discomfiture. I am troubled. Fine art, truly fine art in an art gallery, is a place where a copyrighted work becomes a fetish object, a tribute, a decontextualized thing revealing a new meaning. The urinal of Marcel Duchamp. The Brillo Box of Andy Warhol. Both utilitarian objects made by others and fetishized by the artists.

And look at L.H.O.O.Q. - nothing original in the execution, but the Mona Lisa was in the public domain at the time. Prince is blatantly stealing. Plagiarists take the words of others and try to make you believe that they have crafted them. But Prince's cutouts from advertising, porn and outlaw biker magazines never misled the consumer.

But somewhere, something bothers me about shutting a highly respected fine artist down completely and burning his works when the first sale doctrine would permit him to buy a copy, modify it and resell it. When the First Amendment lets even repulsive speech be heard and the contemporary art world says it is art, I have a problem with the government burning it.

To me, an original work of fine art properly labeled as such by a new artist is almost pure speech - or in some way pure idea - even if it includes major appropriations. Things change when the artwork is widely reproduced. When the consumers are paying tens of thousands for Prince to take something no one is interested in, put his spin on it, and add value. Prince's "appropriation" added ten million dollars worth of value to a pile of books. Everyone knew he didn't create the original.

This is not a question of consumers being defrauded, these are wealthy ultrasophisticates on the cutting edge who are the purchasers - surrounded by the top art advisers and critics -if these people feel that Prince's value added is that great, what is the harm in letting them indulge, as long as Prince legally purchased the original books? In fact, Prince's prices will probably soar - scarcity and scandal drive art prices up.

You should click through to read the entire Dowd piece, which includes multiple images to back up what he has to say. In the end, his point is really the key one: no one is being harmed here. No one is being fooled. Art is a form of speech, and even if you personally don't think much of it, or are upset about how the artist goes about it, is that really something for a court to decide?

In the context of music, we were just discussing how an appropriation artist like "Kutiman" was creating new artwork by pulling from YouTube. And, even some of the staunchest copyright defenders in our comments said what he was doing was fine, trying to distinguish his "creative" appropriation with "consumptive" appropriation by others. Well, here's another case of "creative" appropriation. So why isn't it allowed?

May 15, 2010

via:
brendanschlagel—May 12, 2010
—
"Walking on Eggshells" is a 24-minute documentary about
appropriation, creative influence, re-use and intellectual property in
the remix age. It is a conversation among various musicians, visual
artists, writers and lawyers, all sharing their views on why and how we
use and create culture, and how intellectual property law, originally
designed to provide people with incentives to create, sometimes hinders
creative production far more than it enhances it.

[This film is the final project of Jacob Albert, Ryan
Beauchamp & Brendan Schlagel for Elizabeth Stark's
seminar "Intellectual Property in the Digital
Age" at Yale University.]

February 27, 2010

Ready to go all Ollie North on your art and other meaningful pieces of paper. (Image courtesy of Steve and Jaime at Brooklyn Street Art.)

There is all kinds of goodness going down at the #CLASS show at Winkleman Gallery
in the coming week and I’m hoping you join us. On Saturday (as in
tomorrow), William Powhida will be leading a gallery walk/slush in
Chelsea, Mira Schor will be reading from her essay On Failure and Anonymity and blogbuds Barry Hoggard and James Wagner
will be talking all about collecting. On Sunday, there will be hanging
out, Battleship and artsy talk in Second Life. And, next Wednesday, at
2pm, I will be assisting my partner-in-crime, El Celso’s performance of
Art Shred,
in which he will dispose of several dozen works of art, meaningful
love letters and one-of-a-kind family photos. If you haven’t submitted
anything for shredding, no worries: walk-ins are welcome. I’ll
personally be disposing of a raft of love letters from someone who I
once had a kind of intense mind-meld with. Yes, it will be wrenching to
see them destroyed.